STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT

CMU students at the undergraduate and graduate level regularly use the station for research.

Current Conservation Biology master’s student Mary Benjamin is focusing her summer’s work on secretive marsh birds in coastal wetlands. She is trying to determine if passive acoustic recorders will increase the detections of secretive marsh birds, specifically Virginia Rail and Sora. This will also help to determine if these species are more likely to call during darkness than daylight.

She has deployed 18 acoustic recorders across Beaver Island and nearby islands, and plans to start analyzing the collected data in July. Testing of acoustic recorders will aid in refining monitoring protocols for bird species and assessing ecosystem health of coastal wetlands. Mary is in Dr. Tom Gehring’s research lab and part of the Coastal Wetland Monitoring Program. The inspiration for this research was the overall lack of rail detections in data gathered on bird species through bird call surveys in the Coastal Wetland Monitoring Program (see more on the CWMP on page 8).